Sophie Crumb: Interview

Sophie Crumb drew from an early age. Her father, cartoonist Robert
Crumb, kept the pictures as a record of the way she found her voice. She
talks to Gaby Wood.

By Gaby Wood

4:18PM GMT 25 Feb 2011

In 1994, the American film maker Terry Zwigoff made what would become a cult documentary, Crumb. Its subject was so psychologically complex that Philip Larkin’s assertion about the effect of mums and dads could barely scratch its surface: the cartoonist Robert Crumb. Better known as R Crumb, he was a hero of American counterculture in the Sixties and Seventies. His early work in the Zap Comix series was printed by one of the Beats in San Francisco and sold by Crumb himself on the streets of Haight-Ashbury.

His characters – psychedelic, existential and unquenchable in their graphic sexual thirst – were not always easy to stomach, and Zwigoff’s portrayal of him (awkward visits to his mother and his reclusive brother; riding piggyback on his wife around a gallery) did little, on the whole, to endear him to women.

But Crumb, it turns out, is not just an irrepressible artist; he’s also a champion archivist and encouraging father. Ever since his 29-year-old daughter Sophie was two and a half, he has saved her best drawings. Now in their sixties, he and his wife Aline Kominsky-Crumb, who have worked together for years, have edited a selection of their daughter’s work, culled from sketchbooks and diaries and poured into a book entitled Sophie Crumb: Evolution of a Crazy Artist.

For Robert Crumb, drawing has been a lifelong compulsion, and a form of communication that replaced others. “The only voice he had was his pen,” Kominsky-Crumb has said. And so much of the interest of this curated book lies in finding out how his child found her voice – in seeing the development, essentially, of a form of writing that doesn’t involve words.

“I’m not as anti-social as him,” Sophie Crumb says, from her home in France (the family moved there from California when she was nine). “But I drew a lot to entertain my dad. He was a very good audience.” While her parents were sketching their Weirdo and Dirty Laundry comic series, Sophie sat in front of the TV watching old Max Fleischer cartoons like Betty Boop and Popeye.

“How much is nature, how much is nurture? The cartoons they watched, the 1920s junk in the house – it all comes out like bodily fluid,” Sophie says. “Would I draw if I was adopted into another family? I don’t know.”

The Crumb aesthetic – voice, if you like – is clearly detectable from an early age: “Family Peeing”, drawn on lined notebook paper at the age of four, is biologically specific; at seven Sophie was already sketching narratives in a strip (“She turns into a pizza slice”); and it’s not long before bug eyes, bulging genitals and rotten mouths appear in her doodles.

How wedded is she to the idea of herself as a “crazy artist”? I ask. “I’m not crazy in the sense of psychotic,” she replies. “Just crazy in the sense of wacky. It’s like growing up in a weird family – it seems normal until you realise you’re a freak.”

She admits that her sketchbooks are self-censoring to some extent – “I always know that my parents are going to be looking at them. So I can’t talk about my sex life in them – even if my parents don’t stop themselves from doing it!”

And she can’t express everything she wants to record (“I constantly feel the frustration of not being able to put everything into drawings”). But she can’t give up. “My life is so… intense,” she says. “If I lost all my sketchbooks it would be a disaster. I’m afraid of forgetting.”

For Sophie, comics were never a career – for one thing, there was too much weight attached to the name of Crumb in such circles; she went to circus school, and trained to be a tattoo artist, and got stuck for a while in substance abuse – all of that documented in the sketchbooks. In 2001, her drawings were used by Zwigoff as the work of the Thora Birch character in his feature film Ghost World. Now Sophie is married with a 17-month-old child, and sells her work in a gallery in New York.

What working on the book has taught her is that all parents should save their children’s work. Not because those children might be Michelangelos, but because, as she says appreciatively: “Any kid can blossom, and fill pages with zany stuff.”

* Sophie Crumb: Evolution of a Crazy Artist, ed by S, A and R Crumb (Norton)